EVENTS

Nada al-Ahdal

There’s an 11-year-old girl in Yeman, Nada al-Ahdal, who has a lot of courage and good sense.

A video, posted on YouTube, shows an 11-year-old Yemeni girl called Nada al-Ahdal recounting how she escaped her parents who wanted to force her to marry. Nada comes from a modest family and is one of eight siblings. Fortunately for her, her uncle Abdel Salam al-Ahdal, a montage and graphics technician in a TV station, decided to take her in when she was three years old, to live with him and his aging mother, away from her parents.

Here is that video:

I would have had no life, no education. Don’t they have any compassion?

Comments

I wrote an article on this and also included a photo from a NatGeo magazine section that talked about forced child marriages. If you see the photo you will be shocked, grown men pictured standing as husbands with 11, 12, 13 year old girls.

If there is any way that I can help these young women, I will!
If there is any way of giving them strength, not that amazingly enough Nada Al-Ahdal seems to lack of any, I will!
I there’s any way that we, the ones feeling so strongly about this that it bothered us to the core, that we had to write this, can build a network reuniting these young women and making their voices more heard, I’m willing to be in on it!
Please contact me, or let me know, how we can smack these cruelties in the face and have these young women raise their hands and voices in a powerful way in our future lives and societies.
It doesn’t matter where I live or what I do at present. If there is such a thing I can involve myself with and make it , be part of it to grow into something so free and powerful, I will!
Things come naturally to fruition.
Sincerely, Sylvia Arkilanian

I just want to point out the source for this video is MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI is not an uncontroversial source; they have been accused of anti-Arab bias and mistranslation of the videos they put online.

That’s not a reason to ignore the terrible social problem of forced child marriage, but I confess I’d be more sanguine about this particular case if there was another independent source reporting it.